Medicos with misdemeanours ... actor Edie Falco as Jackie Peyton in Nurse Jackie. Her character is described as having “an occasional weakness for Vicodin, Adderall, Percocet, Xanax, and Oxycontin to get her through the days”.Source: News Limited

FOR Dr Marc Myer the trouble began when a cancer patient he was treating died.

The patient’s family came to visit him at the small town practice where he worked in rural Minnesota, bringing with them all their unused pain medication.

“That’s when I saw my chance,” said the former family doctor, who instead of handing over the drugs to the practice like he was supposed to, kept them for himself.

“I started using that same night.”

Dr Myer’s drug of choice at first was the pain med Percocet and he described his first ever experience with the drug as “spiritual”.

“It made me feel euphoric, more alive, and I looked for any reason to use it,” he said.

Unsurprisingly, he soon became addicted, and as his need grew so did his willingness to violate medical ethics.

“I would ask patients to bring in their meds so we could do a pill count and then, finding some way to distract them, I’d steal from their supply.

“I began prescribing opiates which I knew patients wouldn’t tolerate so that they could return them to me and I could keep them for myself.”

This meant patients suffering side-effects like vomiting and nausea as a result of the wrongly prescribed drugs; side-effects that Dr Myer knew could be avoided.

“There was a lot of guilt but I would drown it out with drugs,” he said. “I’d wake at 3am every morning hating myself, swearing to myself that I was going to stop. But by 10am the withdrawal had kicked in and, needing to get through the day, I’d go back to the drugs.”

Because of the trust society places in doctors and nurses, addiction among medical professionals is still taboo.

Yet it’s a serious problem.

Jailed ... Dr David KwiatkowskiSource: Supplied

Speaking out ... Dr Marc MyerSource: Supplied

According to research in the US, drug and alcohol addiction levels among doctors and nurses stand at between 10 and 14 per cent — even higher among specialties like anaesthesiology and emergency staff.

In recent years US TV medical dramas like House and Nurse Jackie have drawn attention to the problem with main characters who are addicted to drugs. Even so, the glamorous TV treatment can sometimes mask the dark and grubby reality.

For those with drug problems, diverting medication from patients in the way Dr Myer was doing is a common tactic for feeding their addiction. But it can have terrible repercussions.

In perhaps the worst case to come to light to date David M. Kwiatkowski, a radiology technician in Michigan, was jailed for nearly 40 years after he was found to have infected 45 patients with hepatitis C after injecting himself with narcotics from the hospital where he worked.

And last week it was revealed that a doctor at another Michigan hospital had overdosed on stolen pain medication — on the very day that a nurse at the same institution died in a similar incident.

Dr Timothy Sutton was found in a locked bathroom with a needle still in his arm at the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Centre in Ann Arbor.

Dr Sutton survived but three hours earlier a 29-year-old nurse, Carla DelVecchio, had been found dead in a nearly identical situation in another bathroom in the unit.

Dead ... nurse Carla DelVecchioSource: Supplied

Survived ... Dr Timothy SuttonSource: Supplied

In the two overdose cases and in the Kwiatkowski case, the drug they took was Fentanyl — a powerful opiate used for pain relief and as an anaesthetic in surgery.

Fentanyl is one of the most commonly abused drugs by doctors, sid Dr Ethan Bryson, an anaesthesiologist and psychiatrist at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital. He has published a book about drug addiction among doctors, called Addicted Healers.

“It gives the biggest bang for your buck and can be easily diverted from hospital supplies,” said Dr Bryson, who estimates that about 80 per cent of anaesthesiologists who develop drug addictions get hooked on Fentanyl.

One group are performance-enhancing drugs for worn-out, overworked doctors who need to “turn themselves up”. These include psychostimulants like Adderall, methamphetamines and cocaine, and this type of addiction is more common among emergency staff, he said.

At the other end of the scale are drugs for stressed-out doctors looking to switch off. High on the list are the synthetic opiates like OxyContin, Fentanyl and Properfol, the drug that killed Michael Jackson.

He said that the strength of these opiates means that, of those who get addicted, “most are dead or in treatment within a year.”

“They grab hold of you quickly, tightly,” he says.

Those that survive are usually saved by an intervention. In Dr Myer’s case, too, it took his colleagues stepping in for him to deal with the problem.

“My partners began to notice changes in behaviour,” said the 41-year-old. “I was showing up to work dirty, wearing only my scrubs. There were patients who were becoming aware they were missing meds; pharmacists noticing I was prescribing an inordinate amount of opiates.”

Eventually the medical director at his practice confronted him. But despite several stints in rehab he couldn’t shake his addiction. His medical license was suspended and he ended up in a homeless shelter.

It was only after he went into a treatment program aimed specifically at healthcare professionals that he was able to conquer his demons.

“There are lots of issues specific to healthcare professionals that only a dedicated program can address,” he said.

Dr Myer knows these issues well, and not just from personal experience. After his success in the program — he’s been clean since 2008 — he became the director of his own program at the Hazelden Addiction Treatment Centre in Minnesota, using his experience to help others break free from the cycle of addiction.

He said that one of the hardest things to overcome for addicted medical professionals is the “profound guilt and shame they carry about having betrayed their code of ethics”, which often keeps them from admitting their problem to peers.

Because of this, US states where confidential treatment programs are in place have three times as many addicts self-reporting.

“There’s no excuse for doctors abusing their position of trust,” he said. “But addiction is a disease and the more we see it that way the better chance we’ll have of dealing with it.”

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